RITCHIE BLACKMORE - Back in black

21. February 2018

Ritchie Blackmore

RITCHIE BLACKMORE - Back in black

Ritchie Blackmore will be seventy-three on the fourteenth of April. He is then on tour with Rainbow: five concerts in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Helsinki, Berlin and Prague. The British master guitarist has regained his enjoyment of rock music. And this basic satisfaction can also be seen in the interview. Blackmore has always been attached to the image of the capricious contemporary. In the five interviews I have conducted with him since 1985, however, he was always friendly, courteous and willing to provide information. At the same time, he is pleasantly self-critical, but often tends towards irony and humorous provocation, which is repeatedly taken at face value by quite a few press representatives. Blackmore doesn't segregate rehearsed promotional phrases. On the contrary, it sometimes seems as if it is looking for the right formulation to be able to express what it wants to say more precisely. It can happen that you hear the following from him: "Forget what I just said, I'll try to answer it differently again."

eclipsed: From your well-known provocative and ironic statements, some of your fans, whether from hard rock or medieval folk music, have been bitterly pushed open. The one where you like Heino and German hits. Did you really mean that?

Ritchie Blackmore: I didn't become a musician to give interviews all the time. I know it's part of the business. But I'm not as experienced as many others in my profession who are always completely serious from start to finish and promote their new product or tour. Sometimes I am also bored by the questions and try to pour a little oil into the outgoing fire by exaggerations and exaggerations.

eclipsed: So the pop statement was such a head?

Blackmore: Do I have to answer that seriously? Okay, with Blackmore's Night we've often been invited to German TV shows where many people from this scene perform. By the way, at the beginning of Deep Purple, we also appeared on television with pop stars. These are often clever and nice colleagues who do their job really well. And if someone like Heino keeps up for decades, he has to do something damn right. Musically it's not necessarily my construction site, even if I think some pop songs are great. Mike Oldfield, whether he was more pop, more folk or more bombastic, I always liked it. And ABBA are probably the biggest pop band of all time after the Beatles.

eclipsed: Did you also like pop music when you were angry young man?

Blackmore: When I started making music in the sixties, the beat wave was still in full swing. The Beatles were the measure of all things. Tommy Steele, a British rock'n'roller, was my first youth idol. But then the Beatles got more sophisticated and other bands like Procol Harum knocked me down. The Yardbirds with Jeff Beck were a challenge for a guitarist, but when Jimi Hendrix came, everything else next to him seemed gray and muffled for a moment.

Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow - Memories in Rock II - DVD Trailer - (Release: 06th April 2018)

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